Posts Tagged ‘COST’

Curtis Poe, a writer on U.S. expat issues, explains why many banks don’t want U.S. citizens as clients and describes the difficulties American expats may face in getting jobs.

Get a link to a free resource specially geared to American expats about opening a U.S. brokerage account from Israel.

Does the discrimination that American citizens face abroad make it worthwhile for expats to renounce their U.S. citizenship?

What are the most common financial myths? On today’s show, host Douglas Goldstein CFP® debunks financial myths, such as not being able to transfer funds to/from America or that you always have to support your adult children.

The Goldstein On Gelt Show is a financial podcast. Click on the player below to listen. For show notes and contact details of the guest, go to www.GoldsteinOnGelt.com

Mada al-Carmel “Contribute to better understanding of the impact of Israeli discriminatory laws and practices on Palestinian Citizens of Israel…”

Mossawa Center for Advocacy “Build an international network of support for the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel to challenge human rights violations they face.”

Molad: “Garner Israeli public and political support against settlements.”

You’ll note that the first two grants above are not for helping Palestinian Authority Arabs “under occupation”, but for Israeli Arabs – the same Israeli Arabs that sit as Supreme Court judges and Members of Knesset, and as citizens who receive equal treatment under the law (other than that they don’t have to get drafted into the army).

Another document from the “Outcomes of Presidential Portfolio Reviews, 2014” showed that their strategies are to:

“focus on raising the cost of the occupation and ending it on the one hand, and on human rights advocacy and protection on the other.”

You don’t need to be a genius to understand what “raising the cost of the occupation” means in plain English.

IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot has recently ordered the cancellation of the Hannibal Directive, to be replaced by a new directive which is being worked out, Ha’aretz reported on Tuesday, citing a senior IDF source who claims the chief’s decision had been reached independent of a leaked draft of the State Comptroller which recommends taking out the Hannibal option.

According to Israeli media, the Hannibal Directive was conceived in 1986 by a group of top Israeli officers following the capture of two Israeli soldiers during a Hezbollah ambush in South Lebanon in June 1986. Both soldiers presumably died during the attack, and their bodies were returned to Israel in an exchange with Hezbollah in 1996. The directive authorizes stopping abductors by shooting at them, even if it puts captured Israeli soldiers at risk. There is a dispute as to whether the directive includes authorization to kill captured IDF soldiers when it becomes clear that they cannot be rescued. Some reports have claimed that the policy actually promotes the killing of captured soldiers to prevent the need for prisoner exchanges.

On Tuesday Israeli media reported a leak from a draft recommendation by State Comptroller Retired Judge Joseph Shapiro, which had been handed to seniors in the political, military and judiciary echelons as part of the comptroller’s report on the 2014 Gaza War.

The Hannibal Directive was last executed in connection with the kidnapping of Lt. Hadar Goldin of the Givati special force, during the Rafah battle in August 2014, remembered as Black Friday. Once it was known that Goldin had been kidnapped, a widespread chase ensued, which included infantry units as well as a mass shelling of the area, which resulted in the deaths of many civilians.

Eventually it turned out that Goldin had been killed during the kidnapping attempt, and his body is being kept as a bargaining chip by the Hamas. The Military Attorney General at the time, Gen. Danny Efroni, and the new MAG Gen. Sharon Afek have both considered and decided to forego a criminal investigation of the event, because of international criticism over the large number of collateral civilian casualties.

Jordanian Prime Minister Abdalla Ensour and his cabinet approved a new plan to trade water with Israel. In a new Red Sea desalination project expected to cost $1 billion, Jordan will sell part of the resulting water to Israel in exchange for water from the Tiberias reservoir.

Middle East countries are known to face chronic water shortages.

“We will sell Israel water at a rate of JD1 per cubic metre and buy from them at a rate of JD0.3 per cubic metre. This process will save us the effort and cost of conveying water from the south to the northern governorates,” Ensour said, the Jordan Times reported.

According to Jordanian Minister of Water and Irrigation Hazem Nasser, the agreement is legal based on Article 2 of the peace treaty signed with Israel in 1994, and is of “strategic national interest” to Jordan.

The best database of seforim (books written about Torah topics are called seforim even though the word just means books, it has connotations of holiness and importance) is Otzar HaHochma. The Otzar has every sefer you could possibly need. They have 47,350 books in the their database. Each of them is searchable so you can really find anything that’s been written about anything.

Searching is free but reading and printing cost money. Full, unlimited access costs a lot of money. (If you’d like to sponsor a subscription for me, I’ll graciously accept.)

There are several tiers of Otzar subscriptions. Here is the current pricelist:

420 books of the Ahavat Shalom Publishers, including books published for the first time from manuscripts as well as fundamental books.

To add 4,200 books of Kehot Publication Society (Chabad) Cost: $ 90

An extensive collection of Chabad publications, including ancient and rare books, as well as all basic Chasidic sources, Torah files, history books, and albums. The collection has been made possible through the generous
assistance of Kehat Publishing.

Network license: $210 for each station.

Notice anything interesting?

The full database includes 47,350 books. But one can get a 45,150 book version as well. (Otzar thinks this is 1200 fewer books. It’s actually 2200). This version is called the “Bnei Torah” edition. The words bnei Torah are used to imply one is a yeshiva student or Haredi. It’s unfortunate that one cannot be considered a modern ben Torah, but such is the foible of language. So if you are a ben Torah you don’t want access to 2,200 of the books on the Otzar database. These books are deemed inappropriate for Haredim because they are inconsistent with Haredi perspectives.

This is incredible. All the books in the Otzar are frum texts. They are all legitimate seforim from reputable Torah scholars. Yet, a small segment of these books is not consistent with Haredi thinking. Well, of course not! Not everything in Judaism has always been Haredi. That much is obvious to any Torah scholar. But in order to reinforce an imaginary history where nothing was inconsistent with Haredi Judaism, these books are excised from the subscription. It’s really amazing. These are not anti-orthodox books. That’s for sure. These are just books that “do not correspond to the Haredi sector.” Turns out, it’s forbidden to read books that might inform you that your way of life is not the only way of life that is legitimate within orthodox Judaism. Pretty sad.

As for me, I want a list of these 2200 books. I also want to know who the censor is and what the criteria are for removal from the Bnei Torah list. I also want to learn those 2200 seforim, pronto.

At a recent press conference, President Obama delivered a reassuring announcement to the millions of Americans who are wary of the upcoming deluge of ObamaCare’s full implementation: “For the average American out there, for the 85 and 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, this thing’s already happened. And their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better and more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. They don’t have to worry about anything else.”

Well. “Full stop.” So that solves it. Is everyone happy now?

The theatrics from the president are appreciated; they lighten the mood a bit. But they’ll fall short when you don’t have health insurance and are faced with either being uninsured or joining the Medicaid rolls. “Full stop” is actually less of an authoritative command than an indication of what will happen to many people’s insurance coverage once ObamaCare is fully implemented. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out earlier this year, the entirety of ObamaCare’s regulatory framework will likely raise premiums in thirteen states “somewhere between 65% and 100%.” This includes my home state of Virginia, which, even at the lowest end of the scale, would find me paying a little over $250 a month for health insurance after ObamaCare goes into high gear. “Full stop” is what will then occur with my premium payments; but once I cancel the plan, I won’t have to worry about anything else. So it turns out that the president is partly right.

It’s instructive to witness the inability of politicians to accurately predict their own legislative outcomes. In 1967, Congress predicted that Medicare spending would equal only $12 billion per year by 1990 — a paltry sum. Actual spending for that year was $110 billion, so they were slightly off the mark. But of course, by that point, Medicare was fully entrenched in the American political system, and the notion of even modestly reforming it was off the table (it evidently continues to be off the table today). Thus stands the ossified character of American government, and thus will likely stand ObamaCare twenty-five years from now, too. Full stop.

It’s not just the left of the political spectrum that has dismal results in predicting its own spending habits. Years ago, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon predicted that the Iraq war would cost between $2 billion and $4 billion a month. The actual result was nearly $8 billion a month. Rumsfeld also expressed doubt that the war would last even six months. Well, it lasted a little longer than that; coupled with the grossly underestimated price tag, we’ve spent a lot more in Iraq than we thought we would, and for a much longer time than we thought we would have to. So the government is as bad at predicting outcomes of war as it is at predicting outlays of medical spending.

Even the so-called nonpartisan government officials (an hilarious paradoxical idea, but we’ll allow it) aren’t good at the business of fortune-telling. The CBO estimated in 1999 that the federal government would have a budget surplus of $388 billion in 2009, ten years down the road. The actual number was somewhat closer to adeficit of one-and-a-half trillion dollars. Ah, well, it’s a simple matter of arithmetic. And in any case, the report had its bases (or its baseline, if you like) covered: “CBO’s economic projections assume that no legislative action is taken that would affect the projections of revenue and spending.” So that’s all it takes!

The history of dismal government projections should be sobering for the politicians we elect to represent us. The Great Society legislators were all but certain that their old-age insurance program would be manageable and prudent; it now stands as perhaps the chief threat to the financial stability of the United States government. Decades later, our leaders thought we could be in and out of the Middle East in half a year, tops — yet there are children in this country who know nothing other than the reality of our country’s being at war with Iraq. A hundred other examples of failed conjecture are readily available. And still there is a political class that believes that it can enact massive pieces of legislation and accurately predict how they will end up.

So who believes President Obama regarding ObamaCare, anyway? Ditto Nancy Pelosi, who even openly confessed to not knowing the bill’s contents when she voted for its passage. Ditto everyone who continues to support the behemoth law as it trudges towards full implementation.

WHAT: The 5K Run for Family Fitness, created to promote the idea of lifelong healthy living for the entire family, begins and ends at the Michael-Ann Russell JCC campus in North Miami Beach. Participants include runners of all levels and ages as well as teams representing community businesses and organizations. Non-runners are welcome to participate in the One-Mile Fun Walk for Wellness. Funds collected will benefit the Health and Wellness programs and the MAR-JCC.